"Yes, we'll make it nicely," concluded Howell, as we went down the steps. A man used to motoring ten miles to catch the nine-thirty to town could not have been more certain of the disposal of his time than this soldier on the way to an attack. His car which was waiting had a right of way up to front such as is enjoyed only by the manager of the works on his own premises. Of course he paid no attention to the sign, "This road is shelled; closed to vehicles," at the beginning of a stretch of road which looked unused and desolate.
"A car in front of me here the other day received a direct hit from a 'krump,' and car and passengers practically disappeared before my eyes," he remarked, without further dwelling on the incident; for the Germans were, in turn, irritated with the insistence of these stubborn British that they could take Thiepval.
Three prisoners in the barbed-wire inclosure that we passed looked lonely. They must have been picked up in a little bombing affair in a sap.
"I think that they will have plenty of companions this evening," said Howell. "How they will enjoy their dinner!" He smiled in recollection as did I of that familiar sight of prisoners eating. Nothing excites hunger like a battle or gives such zest to appetite as knowledge that you are out of danger. I know that it is true and so does everybody at the front.
As his car knew no regulations except his wishes he might take it as far as it could go without trying to cross trenches. I wonder how long it would have taken me if I had had a map and asked no questions to find my way to the gallery seat which Howell had chosen for watching the show. After we had passed guns with only one out of ten firing leisurely but all with their covers off, the gunners near their pieces and ample ammunition at hand, we cut straight up the slope, Howell glancing at his wrist watch and asking if he were walking too fast for me. We dropped into a communication trench at a point which experience had proven was the right place to begin to take cover.
"This is a good place," he said at length, and we rubbed our helmets with some of the chalk lumps of the parapet, which left the black spot of our field glasses the only bit of us not in harmony with our background.
It was a perfect afternoon in late summer, without wind or excessive heat, the blue sky unflecked; such an afternoon as you would choose for lolling in a hammock and reading a book. The foreground was a slope downward to a little valley where the usual limbless tree-trunks were standing in a grove that had been thoroughly shelled. No one was in sight there, and an occasional German five-point-nine shell burst on the mixture of splinters and earth.
On the other side of the valley was a cut in the earth, a ditch, the British first-line trench, which was unoccupied, so far as I could see. Beyond lay the old No Man's Land where grass and weeds had grown wild for two seasons, hiding the numerous shell-craters and the remains of the dead from the British charge of July 1st which had been repulsed. On the other side of this was two hundred yards of desolate stretch up to the wavy, chalky excavation from the deep cutting of the German first-line trench, as distinct as a white line on dark-brown paper. There was no sign of life here, either, or to the rear where ran the network of other excavations as the result of the almost two years of German digging, the whole thrown in relief on the slope up to the bare trunks of two or three trees thrust upward from the smudge of the ruins of Thiepval.
Just a knoll in rolling farm country, that was all; but it concealed burrows upon burrows of burrowers more cunning than any rodents—men. Since July 1st the Germans had not been idle. They had had time to profit from the lesson of the attack with additions and improvements. They had deepened dugouts and joined them by galleries; they had Box and Cox hiding-places; nests defensible from all sides which became known as Mystery Works and Wonder Works. The message of that gashed and spaded hillside was one of mortal defiance.
Occasionally a British high explosive broke in the German trench and all up and down the line as far as we could see this desultory shell fire was proceeding, giving no sign of where the next attack was coming, which was part of the plan.